Search brisbanetimes:

Search in:

Indie review: Outlast

Trust me, you don't want to know what he's about to do with that knife.

I am hiding under a steel-framed hospital bed.

I peer left and right into the gloom around me; naked light bulbs draw deep black shadows from upturned furniture, and in the shadows I see desperate eyes turned toward me, other "patients" of this mad, mutilated surgeon, chained to their beds.

And there, there he is, at first just a silhouette striding through the room, and then he steps into a pool of light. This supposed doctor is dressed only in a leather apron, revealing the hideous scars that cover his entire body. He exchanges some words with the patient in the middle of the room, and then, without warning, plunges his long, curved autopsy shears through the bound man's chest.

His bloody work done, the doctor strolls casually down the adjoining hallway, toward the room I have just escaped from. Panic suddenly hits me: he's about to discover that I'm loose, and then he will begin hunting for me.

Advertisement

Desperate, I take the chance; I slip out from under the bed and tiptoe toward the exit. Follow the blood trails, the words on the wall had said. With no other clues to lead me through this maze of grimy rooms, I do so: scarlet smears, like the traces of bodies being dragged across the tiles, lead through the doorway and curve left into the corridor outside.

That's when I hear my captor, and would-be torturer, scream. As expected, he has found my cell empty, and any moment he will begin hunting me. I give up on caution and simply run, following the trail of blood. Behind me I can hear the ringing metallic scrapes as the surgeon opens and closes his huge, pointed scissors.

Left, right, left again, I plunge from room to corridor to room, until... There it is! The lift that brought me to this floor! The lift that I know will take me to the level where the open exterior doors will lead me to freedom!

I duck inside and press the button... and my breath freezes in my throat.

"This elevator requires a key."

. . .

Outlast is scary.

If you don't like a well-made scary game, you might as well stop reading this review right now, because Outlast is really, really scary.

This is classic survival horror, in the vein of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. You are given no weapons or defences, just a video camera (with a night vision mode that drains batteries like nobody's business) and a notebook. An introductory screen of text makes it very clear, explaining that in this game you have three choices: run, hide, or die.

The premise is a familiar one: a dogged investigative reporter who has been trying to take down a rogue corporation for years gets an anonymous tip that the company, which normally sets up shop in third world countries in order to avoid legal complications, has a secret laboratory in the USA.

The lab is inside a remote abandoned mental hospital, Mount Massive Asylum, quietly restored to operation by the wealthy and unethical corporation. However, the player arrives to find the supposedly bustling facility silent and dark, and your first step inside reveals why: staff, patients, and guards are scattered like bloody dolls throughout the interior. Something terrible has happened here, and naturally it's still happening.

Exactly what it is going on is one of the game's ongoing mysteries, revealed little by little by recovered documents, scrawled messages on walls, and bizarre monologues from the asylum's inhabitants.

Oh yes, those inhabitants. They're fun. The asylum's business seems to have involved some kind of experimentation to unlock hidden talents inside the human brain, but their methods seem to be little more than mutilation and torture. Most of the freakish characters you meet have been subjected to horrific impromptu surgery, with some unable to see or speak due to grotesque facial mutilation.

Many of these poor souls are just as much victims of this terrible place as your own character, but some of them are not so benign. The game's signature recurring villain is a hulking brute whose lips have been cut off, giving him a hideous permanent grin. His favourite party trick is to hold down a victim with one hand and tear his head off with the other. There's nothing quite like catching a glimpse of your own headless body, neck stump spurting blood, just before you reload the last checkpoint.

Outlast is gruesome, violent, and downright disturbing. One threat faced early in the game is a pair of naked men carrying gigantic knives, who converse in soft, polite tones about which of them will get to eat your liver. The asylum is dotted with severed limbs, puddled intestines, heads bobbing up and down in toilets, and blood, oh so much blood - messages written in it on the walls, great pools of it across the floors (which make you leave bloody footprints behind after walking through them), and even a sewer running with rivers of it.

However, the gore is a means to an end; Outlast uses gruesome imagery to disturb the player, to put you off balance. This is coupled with the atmospheric lighting and deep shadows, and with a goosebump-raising soundtrack that consists mostly of ambient noise - distant screams, strange growls, and the creaking and groaning of an old building that is as much a character as any of the people residing within it.

Over all of this is the protagonist's laboured breathing and, softer, his heartbeat. Both will speed up when he is stressed or running from danger, making the player feel his fear in an amazingly visceral way.

Outlast scares you by never repeating the same tricks too many times. Every time I thought I had the game figured out, when I was sure that I had grasped the AI behaviour and learned all the rules, the game would surprise me all over again. I got used to fleeing from pursuers through small crawlspaces, for example. If there was an air duct or sewer grate, I always felt safe. That is, until one enemy suddenly reached into the space where I was hiding and dragged me out.

This is a game that encourages complacency, and then punishes you for it. It's cruel, but I'll be damned if it isn't effective. Even worse is when nothing at all happens for long periods. Sometimes a creepy area will be completely empty of threats, and you will go without being attacked for so long that you will end up even more terrified, convinced that it will come from around the next corner. Outlast does shout "boo!" quite a lot, but those frights wouldn't be nearly as effective if it wasn't so good at building up tension during the quiet sections.

It seems mean to pick on such a great game, but it has a few little flaws, most of which are the result of a small indie studio completing an ambitious game with minimal resources. The character animation is probably the game's biggest technical shortcoming - while the protagonist's hands and feet are visible to the player and are animated beautifully, and there are some very effective scripted sequences, when bad guys are just walking around it looks jerky and unconvincing, like something from a much older game. It may sound like nitpicking, but it really detracts from the world's believability.

The other big technical issue is the short length of looping sounds. When a prisoner started screaming to be let out of his cell, I noticed that he was repeating himself every ten seconds or so, and this is typical of many sounds in the game. Another minor issue is the over-use of text prompts and the lack of an option to turn them off: being told to click the left mouse button to open every single door I approached got very annoying.

None of these issues spoil the game, though. Despite its flaws, this is an amazing achievement from such a small independent team, and if you are a PC gamer who likes horror, it is well worth its $20 asking price on Steam. Sadly there is no Mac or Linux version as yet, and its only announced console release is as a downloadable title for the PlayStation 4.

Play it with the lights off, if you dare.

Played an excellent indie game that you think DexX should review? Please nominate it in the comments below.

- James "DexX" Dominguez

DexX is on Twitter: @jamesjdominguez

2 comments so far

Got it on my wishlist along with Machine for Pigs. Was kind of thinking it might not live up to the hype, but it sounds like it does, so that's good news. :)

Commenter

Lucid Fugue

Location

Melbourne

Date and time

September 10, 2013, 9:04AM

Only made it about 20-30 minutes into it at a friends' house. Scared the crap out of me. Am not good with these games at all, and it's much scarier than Penumbra Black Plague, which is the only survival horror game of this nature I've been able to finish. Should really give Amnesia a proper attempt...